Leader of American far-right paramilitary group is based in Russia

January 27, 2020 by 1 Comment

The BaseThe mysterious leader of an American far-right paramilitary group, which authorities say is seeking to overthrow the United States government, runs the organization from Russia, according to a probe conducted by the BBC. The group, which calls itself The Base, is thought to have been formed in the summer of 2018. Since then, it is believed to have recruited dozens of members using encrypted messaging applications.

The Base urges its members to undergo paramilitary training and learn how to evade surveillance by government agencies. It also instructs them to create and use ciphers for communication and trains them to use encrypted applications to exchange messages so that government agencies cannot access their content. The Federal Bureau of Investigation describes The Base as a “racially motivated violent extremist group” that “seeks to accelerate the downfall of the United States government, incite a race war, and establish a white ethno-state”. Earlier this month, authorities arrested three alleged members of the organization, which are accused of engaging in a conspiracy to commit murder.

Despite the attention that The Base has received from American authorities, almost no information is available about the group’s leader and founder. This individual goes by the aliases “Norman Spear” and “Roman Wolf”. But a recent investigation alleged that his name is Rinaldo Nazzaro and that he is a 46-year-old American man from New York. Prior to founding The Base, Nazzaro is believed to have purchased land in a remote area of America’s Pacific Northwest region with the goal of creating a white-only enclave.

Now the BBC has said that Nazzaro is living in Russia, from where he is allegedly running The Base. He is thought to have married a Russian woman in 2012 in the New York borough of Manhattan. The couple probably relocated to the Russian city of St. Petersburg “less than two years ago”, according to the BBC. In an article published on Friday, the BBC said that its researchers had been able to identify Nazzaro from his online activity and from photographs and videos he had posted online in the past year.

► Author: Ian Allen | Date: 27 January 2020 | Permalink

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German government to hire 600 new officers to help monitor far-right activity

December 18, 2019 by Leave a comment

German Federal Criminal Police OfficeThe German government has announced plans to hire hundreds of new police and intelligence officers, in order to step up its monitoring of violent far-right groups in the country. The announcement came at a press conference hosted on Tuesday in Berlin by Horst Seehofer, Germany’s Interior Minister.

Seehofer told reporters that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution —BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence and counterterrorism agency— would hire 300 new officers whose job will be to focus on domestic far-right extremism. The German Federal Criminal Police Office will hire an additional 300 offers for the same purpose, added Seehofer. With these additional 600 officers, federal authorities will be able to increase their monitoring of far-right political groups, football fan clubs, far-right websites, and other hubs of far-right activity, said the minister.

German authorities estimate that there are 12,000 committed far-right extremists in the country who are willing and able to carry out violent attacks inside Germany or abroad. However, nearly 50 percent of actual attacks by adherents of far-right ideologies that have taken place in Germany in recent years have been carried out by individuals who were not on the radar of the police and intelligence services.

In addition to hiring 300 new intelligence officers, the BfV will set up a new “Central Office for Far Right Extremism in Public Service”, whose task will be to uncover adherents of far-right ideologies working in government agencies. The new office will concentrate its investigations on the police, the military and other government bodies.

During his press conference on Tuesday, Minister Seehofer stressed that the intensification of investigations into far-right terrorism would not happen at the expense of probing political violence from the far left and Islamist extremists.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 18 December 2019 | Permalink

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Massive data dump identifies users of influential far-right website

November 12, 2019 by 3 Comments

Atomwaffen DivisionA data dump of unprecedented scale includes usernames, IP addresses and even the content of thousands of private chat logs stolen from an influential neo-Nazi website that is now defunct. The data belonged to IronMarch, which was founded in 2011 by Alexander Mukhitdinov, a Russian far-right activist using the online nom-de-guerre “Slavros”. In the nearly six years of its existence, the website featured some of the most extreme and uncompromising far-right content on the World Wide Web.

The discussions that took place on IronMarch’s message boards are believed to have led to the creation of several far-right groups in Europe, Australia, and the United States. Among them is the notorious Atomwaffen Division (pictured), an American neo-Nazi group that focuses on street-fighting and is known to train its members in the use of military-grade weapons and guerilla warfare tactics. Another group that organized and recruited heavily through IronMarch was Vanguard America, one of the organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.

But the website abruptly shut down its operations in late 2017. No explanation was given. Users of far-right online forums are used to experiencing such sudden changes in hosting platforms, which are due to legal challenges, intervention by law enforcement, etc. So they did what they always do in such cases: they migrated to other far-right platforms where they continued to discuss and organize. IronMach never resurfaced, so it was eventually forgotten.

Last Wednesday, however, a user calling themselves “antifa-data” uploaded what appears to be the entire metadata and chat log archive of IronMarch on the website of the Internet Archive. The content was later removed, but not before it was downloaded by thousands of Internet Archive users, among them government agencies. The data dump reportedly includes the usernames of IronMarch members, as well as the emails associated with their individual accounts. It also contains the IP addresses of IronMarch members and even the contents of private messages that they exchanged with other members.

Some investigative websites have since reported that numerous IronMarch users were associated with email accounts belonging to American universities. Others stated in private messages that they were members of the armed forces of several countries in Europe and the Americas. At least one user appears to have run for Congress in the United States. On Friday, the American website Military Times said that United States authorities were concerned that many of IronMarch’s members said they were serving in the US Armed Forces or expressed a desire to join a military branch. A spokesman for the US Marine Corps told the Military Times that there was “no place for racial hatred or extremism in the Marine Corps”.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 12 November 2019 | Permalink

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Far-right terrorism a transnational threat backed by state actors, says US official

September 23, 2019 by 6 Comments

Slavic UnionThreats posed by white supremacist and other far-right groups are now global in nature and are increasingly backed by state actors, according to a Congressional testimony by an American former counterterrorism official. The testimony was delivered by Joshua Geltzer, former senior director for counterterrorism at the United States National Security Council. Geltzer, who now directs the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, testified on Friday before two subcommittees of the US House of Representatives. The Subcommittee on National Security and the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held a joint hearing entitled “Confronting Violent White Supremacy”.

Geltzer said in his testimony [.pdf] that the type of violence perpetrated by white supremacist groups in America cannot any more be characterized as “domestic”, because it is quickly becoming transnational in character. White supremacist violence in America is part of a “global surge” that is “increasingly interlinked and internationalized”. In fact, the attackers themselves internationalize their role in this global movement by referencing white supremacist violence in other parts of the world to justify the use of violence in the US, said Geltzer. He added that the emerging center of this global surge of white supremacist violence appears to be located in Ukraine and Russia. It is there that funds provided by the Russian government are being used to train and educate white supremacist leaders in guerrilla warfare, social media propaganda and various forms of ideological training.

It is therefore imperative, said Geltzer, that the US Intelligence Community begins to examine white supremacist violence within this new transnational context. For instance, it would be helpful if the mission of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was changed to include a concentration in so-called “domestic terrorism”, including white supremacist violence, he argued.

Also on Friday, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unveiled its new strategy report. The report views “domestic terrorism and mass attacks” as a growing threat to the United States that is equal in magnitude to the threat posed by Islamist terrorists. The report identifies what it describes as “a disturbing rise in attacks motivated by domestic terrorist ideologies”. One of the most powerful drivers of this new wave of domestic violence is “white supremacy”, according to the DHS.

► Author: Ian Allen | Date: 23 September 2019 | Permalink

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Far-right spy row continues to rock Germany’s ruling coalition

August 19, 2019 by Leave a comment

Hans-Georg MaassenThe successor to Angela Merkel in the leadership of Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) urged the removal from the party of the country’s former spy chief for expressing far-right views. But she later appeared to retract her comments. Hans-Georg Maassen led Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) from August 2012 until his removal last September. His BfV career was abruptly terminated following the so-called Chemnitz protests, a series of anti-immigrant rallies, pogroms and riots that shook the eastern German city of Chemnitz in August of last year. Maassen gave an interview at the time in which he seemed to question the authenticity of videos that surfaced on social media, which showed protesters throwing Nazi salutes and singing Nazi-era songs. The BfV director said that the videos may have been faked as part of a disinformation campaign aimed at stirring racial tensions in Germany. He was promptly dismissed from his post.

Following his dismissal from the BfV, Maassen joined the Werteunion (Values Union), an ultra-conservative group within the CDU, which campaigns for strict anti-immigration laws. Its leader, CDU politician Alexander Mitsch, argues that the CDU should not rule out a governing alliance with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). The AfD is a coalition of Eurosceptic, anti-immigrant and neo-Nazi groups that has gained prominence since its establishment in 2013 and currently polls at around 12 percent nationwide. Mitsch’s view goes against the CDU’s recent decision at its annual conference to rule out any collaboration with the AfD and Die Linke, Germany’s main far-left party. Maassen has also given media interviews in which he has criticized the CDU for “moving far to the left” under the leadership of Angela Merkel.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who succeeded Angela Merkel to the leadership of the CDU, and is tipped to become Germany’s next chancellor, gave an interview on Saturday, in which she dismissed Maassen’s views as nonsense. Kramp-Karrenbauer, who is currently serving as minister of defense, told the Funke Medien media agency she was pleased that Maassen had been dismissed from the directorship of the BfV. She added that she could not see anything in Maassen’s political views that connected him to the CDU. Kramp-Karrenbauer went on to say that she would not allow the CDU to be “radicalized from the inside” like the United States Republican Party had been radicalized by the Tea Party. This was widely interpreted as a call for Maassen and other Werteunion supporters to either resign or be expelled from the party.

On Sunday, however, Kramp-Karrenbauer spoke to the media again, this time to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) news agency, saying that “neither during the [Funke Medien] interview nor elsewhere did I call for a party expulsion procedure” of Maassen and other Werteunion members. She continued by saying that “the CDU is a party with more than 400,000 members. The fact that each one has different opinions is what makes us interesting”. Meanwhile, Maassen told DPA, “it is a mystery to me who advised her to conjure up such thoughts”, referring to Kramp-Karrenbauer’s Saturday interview.

In September and October the CDU will be facing the AfD and several other parties in regional elections that will be taking place in three eastern German states, where the AfD is particularly strong. Many fear that Kramp-Karrenbauer’s party will see its electoral power shrink with many of its voters flocking to the anti-immigration AfD.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 19 August 2019 | Permalink

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Italian police find ‘combat-ready’ air-to-air missile in raids on far-right groups

July 16, 2019 by Leave a comment

Air to air missile ItalyPolice in Italy have found an air-to-air missile in “perfect working order” alongside dozens of guns during raids on homes belonging to members of far-right groups. The raids took place in several northern Italian cities and were coordinated by the Digos, a special unit of the Turin Municipal Police that deals with organized crime and terrorism. Aside from Turin, synchronized raids took place in Varese, Novara, Forli and Milan. According to reports in the Italian media, the raids were part of a large-scale investigation into an extensive network of Italian far-right groups whose members provided logistical and material support to Russian-backed separatists in southeastern Ukraine.

At least three men were arrested in connection with the raids, two of them in Forli and one in Galarate, a small town near Varese on the Italian-Swiss border. They were named as Alessandro Monti, 42, a Swiss national, and Fabio Bernardi, 51, an Italian national. A third man, Fabio Del Bergiolo, 50, also an Italian national, is reportedly a retired customs officer who in 2001 run for office with Forza Nuova, a neo-fascist Italian grouping. Until 2014, Forza Nuova activists were known to have close links with Svoboda, the far-right Ukrainian paramilitary group. But in the past five years, the Italian neo-fascist group’s leaders have openly sided with Ukraine’s pro-Russian rebels. Italian police reported that they found several guns in Bergiolo’s home, including nine unspecified “assault weapons” and 29 hunting rifles, as well as pistols and ammunition. But the most worrying find was an air-to-air guided missile at an airport hangar, which was placed inside a box that belonged to one of the three men. The missile is designed to be fired from an aircraft to target another aircraft. It is reportedly a Matra Super 530F, which was manufactured by France in 1980. According to the police report, it is “in perfect working order”. The most recent legal owner of the missile was the Qatar Air Force. It is not known how it ended up in the hands of the three suspects, but it is believed that they have been seeking to sell it in the black market.

The police raids took place less than two weeks after a court in Genoa sentenced three men for traveling to Russia and taking up arms alongside pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The three men were identified in court reports as Antonio Cataldo, an Italian citizen, Olsi Krutani, from Albania, and Vladimir Vrbitchii, who is from Moldova. The three men received jail sentences ranging from 16 months to 34 months. As a reminder, last September security agencies in Eastern Europe voiced concern about the rise of far-right paramilitary groups whose members allegedly have access to increasingly heavy weaponry, including in some cases armored vehicles and tanks.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 16 July 2019 | Permalink

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France arrests six far-right militants who plotted to kill President Macron

November 7, 2018 by 1 Comment

Emmanuel MacronAuthorities in France have announced the arrest of six individuals who were allegedly involved in a plot to kill French President Emmanuel Macron. Government prosecutors said on Tuesday that the six were arrested for planning “a violent action against the president of the Republic”. A former economy and industry minister, Macron resigned from the cabinet of left-of-center Prime Minister Manuel Valls in 2016 in order to lead a new right-of-center movement called En marche (Forward). In 2017 he won the presidential election with 66.1 percent, becoming the youngest president in the history of France.

French security services have responded to several instances of potential plots against Macron. In one recent case, a man was charged in July of last year with plotting to kill the president during France’s annual Bastille Day celebrations. This latest case, however, appears to be larger in size and sophistication. According to prosecutors, Tuesday’s arrests were part of a wider probe in to “a criminal terrorist association”. All six suspects had reportedly been monitored for quite some time by France’s domestic security agency, the General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI).

The names and backgrounds of those arrested have not been released. But France’s BFM-TV station said on Tuesday that their ages ranged from 20 to 60, that they were men and women, and that they belonged to an unspecified “far-right organization”. It is also notable that their arrests took place as a result of raids in three different parts of the country —namely in the city of Moselle, located on the border of France, Germany and Luxembourg, and in Ille-et-Vilaine near Rennes in France’s northwestern Brittany region. More raids reportedly took place in the region of Isere in the French Alps. Reports early on Wednesday morning said that authorities were examining the details of the alleged assassination scheme, which was “imprecise and loosely formed”.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 07 October 2018 | Permalink

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